Archive for May, 2012

I’ve decided to combine two of my categories because of was wrong in giving them a separated existence, happens. How can you have an opinion unless you first observe a subject? How can you observe something and your mind remain empty? Here’s the first installment under the new heading.

NEWS

I have always been a news junkie, but for sometime now I have been aware of a growing lack of news reported while the lengths of the broadcasts continue to lengthen. I won’t even get into the constant errors the talking heads of our local new here in Philadelphia make. They sail right along without blinking an eye while I cringe in dismay.
The local stations now manage to pack maybe fifteen minutes worth of new in one hour. The rest of the time is taken up with what the latest celebrities are up to. What the station will be showing for the rest of the night. This exposure reinforces my reasons for not watching television programming. They also must give the weather three times until they finally give a forecast.
As readers of my blog know, I’ve had some medical problems recently. During this experience I had little opportunity to watch the news. I’ve grow distant from the mind-numbing hours I once spent before listening to drivel. If I do watch news it is only the national news.
There are times when I think back to my youth and the news was really the news. I suppose it was back in the fifties when the local news began at 6:30 at night and ran until 6:45, and then the national news took over from 6:45 until 7:00.
While I have, for the most part, abandoned news of TV I still stay in touch with newspapers and news magazines. I still want to know what’s going on but I’m trying to be a bit more selective.

With my ever growing new attitude toward the new, I’m reminded of a song from Simon and Garfunkel’s album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, one of my all-time favorite albums.
The song’s title, ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’. The line from the song that I find most appropriate for my new state of mind is, ‘I can gather all the news from the weather report’. I think that says it all.

As I told you recently, I had bypass surgery in March, spent ten days in the hospital and went home feeling pretty good. But that didn’t last very long. I began going downhill fast.

There is a ‘rare’ side effect of surgery call Dressler’s Syndrome where your immune system goes wacky and decides to vent its rage on your body. The syndrome results in inflamed joints, fluid around the lungs or perhaps fluid around the heart. My immune system must have been really pissed and decided to give me all three. Back to the hospital for another ten day

I’m home now and hope to get my writing back in full gear.

I must say that this whole experience has been quite strange for me. I have never spent a night in the hospital before. All during my care I felt I was watching someone else deal with all the efforts to determine and cure all my maladies. But when they began the IVs or drew blood I was brought back to reality.